“We have already seen that, grown from seed, our various fruit trees do not, as a rule, reproduce the quality of fruit of the parent stock; an invincible tendency to revert to the wild state causes the fruit to lose, little by little, from one generation to another, the improvement it had acquired through cultivation. Thus the pear, through repeated plantings of the seed, would become increasingly sour, small, and hard, until it had at last returned to the sorry state of the wild pear growing on the edge of the woods. But this defect attending growth from the seed is redeemed by one very desirable quality: the tree thus grown regains more or less the robustness of its wild type; it is incomparably more vigorous, healthier, longer-lived, than the artificially perfected tree whose strength is compromised by the very excess of its fructification. One has vigor, the other fine fruit. The two attributes cannot go together; if one increases, the other decreases. Well then, these robust specimens reared from the seed are just what we require for grafting. Used as stocks, they supply the quality inherent in them, namely, vigor; and the cutting engrafted upon them furnishes the other quality, excellence of fruit. “Accordingly it is the practice to plant the pips of pears and apples, and the stones of apricots and peaches; and on the trees thus obtained to graft cuttings from pear, apple, apricot, and peach trees that bear fruit of recognized superiority. In this way there are united in the same tree the root and trunk of the robust and almost wild kind with the leaves and blossoms of the weak but artificially improved kind. Every variety of pear tree is by nature fitted to receive a pear graft, every variety of peach tree to receive a peach graft, and so on with all fruit-trees. There is no objection to selecting as stock any wild pear, cherry, or plum tree that may have sprung up of itself in hedge or thicket. It is thus for example that the cherry is grafted on two others of like sort, the wild cherry and the cherry of Saint Lucia, both frequenters of uncultivated hillsides. The first bears fruit hardly as large as a pea, black, round, and full of a very dark and rather bitter juice; the second has still smaller fruit with scarcely any pulp and uneatable. No matter: with grafts from a suitably chosen source they will cover themselves with the finest cherries. In like manner our superb garden roses can be grown on the wild rose stock, the common dog rose of the hedges, whose modest blossoms have only five petals of a pale carnation color and are well-nigh odorless. Sometimes, again, two species of similar characteristics are chosen for grafting purposes. Thus the pear grafts well on the quince-tree, the fruit of the latter being, after all, a sort of big pear; the apricot can be grafted on the plum; the peach on the plum and, still better, on the almond, so like the peach in its foliage, its early blossoming, and the structure of its fruit.